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The Romance of Natural History, Second Series. Philip Henry Gosse
Читать онлайн.Название The Romance of Natural History, Second Series
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4057664564771
Автор произведения Philip Henry Gosse
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
It is probable that this race extended widely over Europe, and even into Asia. Herodotus mentions Macedonian wild oxen, with exceedingly large (ὑπερμεγαθια) horns; and Philip of Macedon killed a wild bull in Mount Orbela, which had made great havoc, and produced much terror among the inhabitants; its spoils he hung up in the Temple of Hercules. The Assyrian artists delighted to sculpture on the royal bas-reliefs of Nineveh the conquest of the wild bull by the prowess of their Nimrod monarchs, and the figures, in their minute anatomical characters, well agree with the descriptions and remains of the European Urus. The large forest that surrounded ancient London was infested with boves sylvestres among other wild beasts, and it is probable that these were Uri. The legendary exploit of Guy, Earl of Warwick, in freeing the neighbourhood from a terrible dun cow, whether historically true or not, shews the existence of formidable wild bovines in the heart of England, and the terror they inspired among the people. The family of Turnbull, in Scotland, are traditionally said to owe their patronymic to a hero who turned a wild bull from Robert the Bruce, when it had attacked him while hunting.
What has become of the terrible Uri which lived in Europe at the commencement of the Christian era? Advancing civilisation has rooted them out, so that no living trace of them remains, unless the cream-white breed which is preserved in a semi-wild state in some of our northern parks be their representatives; or, as is not improbable, their blood may still circulate in our domestic oxen.
Yet there is no doubt of the identity of a species found abundantly in Britain in the Tertiary deposits, and named by Owen Bos primigenius, with the Urus of Cæsar. This fossil bull was as certainly contemporary in this island with the elephant, and the hyena, and the baboon, and, strange to say, with the reindeer, and the musk-ox, too—thus combining a tropical, a temperate, and an arctic fauna in our limited island at the same period! What a strange climate it must have been to suit them all!
Professor Nilsson, who has paid great attention to fossil oxen, mentions a skull of this species which must have belonged to an animal more than twelve feet in length from the nape to the root of the tail, and six feet and a half in height. Again, the skull of a cow in the British Museum, figured by Professor Owen, measures thirty inches from the crown to the tips of the jaws! What a beast must this have been! Would not the slaughter of such a "Dun Cow" as this in single combat have been an exploit worthy of a doughty earl?
That this ancient fossil bull was really contemporary with man in Scandinavia is proved by evidence which is irrespective of the question of its identity with Cæsar's Urus. For one of Professor Nilsson's specimens "bears on its back a palpable mark of a wound from a javelin. Several celebrated anatomists and physiologists, among whom," he says, "I need only mention the names of John Müller, of Berlin, and Andreas Retzius, of Stockholm, have inspected this skeleton, and are unanimous in the opinion that the hole in question upon the backbone is the consequence of a wound, which, during the life of the animal, was made by the hand of man. The animal must have been very young, probably only a calf, when it was wounded. The huntsman who cast the javelin must have stood before it. It was yet young when it died, probably not more than three or four years old."
We may, then, assume as certain that the vast Bos primigenius of Western Europe lived as a wild animal contemporaneously with man; and as almost certain (assuming its identity with the Urus) that it continued to be abundant as late as the Christian era.
The Bos frontosus is a middling-sized bovine. "Its remains," says Professor Nilsson, "are found in turf-bogs in Southern Scandinavia, and in such a state as plainly shews that they belonged to a more ancient period than that in which tame cattle existed in Sweden. This species lived in Scandinavia contemporaneously with the Bos primigenius, and the Bison Europæus. … If ever it was tamed, and thereby in the course of time contributed to form some of the tame races of cattle, it must have been the small-horned, often hornless, breed, which is to be found in the mountains of Norway, and which has a high protuberance between the setting-on of the horns above the nape."
This species occurs in a fossil state in some numbers in Ireland; it has also been found in England. It is by some supposed to be the origin of, or, at least, to have contributed blood to, the middling Highland races with high occiput, and small horns.
There is more certainty of the co-existence of the small B. longifrons with man. Some of the evidence I have already adduced. "Within a few years," says a trustworthy authority, "we have read in one of the scientific periodicals—but have just now sought in vain for the notice—of a quantity of bones that were dug up in some part of England, together with other remains of what seemed to be the relics of a grand feast, held probably during the Roman domination of Britain, for, if we mistake not, some Roman coins were found associated with them. There were skulls and other remains of Bos longifrons quite undistinguishable in form from the antique fossil, whether wild or domesticated, which, of course, remains a question."[55]
Professor Owen conjectures that this species may have contributed to form the present small shaggy Highland and Welsh cattle—the kyloes and runts; and a similar breed in the northern parts of Scania may have had a similar origin.
In the Bison priscus, the fossil remains of which occur in many parts of Europe, and more sparsely in Great Britain,[56] we have an example of a noble animal, which, contemporary with all those which have been engaging our attention, survives to the present hour, but is dying out, and would have long ago been extinguished, probably, but for the fostering influence of human conservation. For the species is considered as absolutely identical with the Bison Europæus of modern zoology, the Bison or Wisent of the Germans, the Aurochs of the Prussians, the Zubr of the Poles, that formidable creature, which is maintained by the Czar in an ever-diminishing herd in the vast forests of Lithuania,[57] and which, perhaps, still lingers in the fastnesses of the Caucasus. This, the largest, or at least the most massive of all existing quadrupeds, after the great Pachyderms, roamed over Germany in some numbers as late as the era of Charlemagne. Considerably later than this it is reckoned among the German beasts of chase, for in the Niebelungen Lied, a poem of the twelfth century, it is said,
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